A common aphorism in the halls of education is that the writing skills of Americans decline over time. Compared to the “golden age of letters,” so the argument goes, each subsequent generation of writers is worse than the last. Although contemporary readers and educators commiserate over encounters with bad writing, a fair comparison of 18th century American exemplars to modern American exemplars reveals a significant advance in clarity, an advance that technical communicators can be proud of. To demonstrate the advances in expository writing over the past two centuries, the author compares what the authors of the U.S. Constitution did with their limited resources to what modern professional communicators do with their abundance of resources. Many of the communication problems that were pervasive when the U.S. Constitution was created have since been remedied by insights emerging from the fields of linguistics, human factors, and cognitive psychology, among others.

Some reading researchers and technical communicators assume the efficacy of readability formulas. Reading researchers use such formulas to equalize the reading difficulty of texts used in experiments. Results of an informal Internet survey indicate that some professional writers and editors use readability formulas that are integrated into word-processing software. This article proposes that readability formulas fail to predict text difficulty. The results of an experiment demonstrate that “text difficulty” is a perception of the reader and therefore cannot be objectively calculated by counting syllables, word length, sentence length, and other text characteristics.

When people read silently, they unconsciously translate what they read into a speech-like code that facilitates word identification and the creation of meaning, especially when they read scientific and technical texts. Many studies have explored how this “silent speech” affects the reading process. As a follow-up to a previous article about applying a phonological reading model to technical communication, this article proposes that educators and practitioners of technical communication would benefit greatly from a thorough understanding of the speech instinct. Therefore, the author explores the speech instinct, how humans developed it, and how it has been and still is fostered by reading behavior and pedagogy.

When people read silently, they unconsciously translate what they read into a speech-like code that facilitates word identification and the creation of meaning. This article examines that phenomenon—known as silent speech—based upon the published research of cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists. The author develops a phonological model of reading based upon published results of experimental investigators to determine the relationship between cognition and silent speech. The author then applies the model to technical communication. The applications include the use of punctuation, pronouns, and abbreviations, as well as introducing new words, writing to satisfy the speech instinct, cultivating a human voice, and revising technical documents.